Urban agriculture blogs

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City Farm Chicago

Urban agriculture, city farming  or in Dutch ‘stadslandbouw‘ is getting more and more into the spotlight. Even though not new, it’s getting new significance and seem to be a growing phenomenon worldwide. One of the ways to keep in touch with new iniatives around the world is to take a RRS-feed on a blog, as I recently discovered myself.  Interesting blogs are e.g. City Farming News, covering news on worldwide initiatives with photo’s and video’s, and the  Dutch ‘Stadslandbouwblog‘ initiated by ‘Eetbaar Rotterdam‘ covering iniatives in and around Rotterdam but also from far away.

Collective approach to farmer marketing – recommendations

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Dutch Initiative Van Eigen ErfRecently our rural sociology group finished an European research project on collective farmers marketing initiatives. The COFAMI project identified a broad set of enabling and limiting factors to explain the emergence of and dynamics within farmers’ driven collective action and developed a methodology to assess their impacts on different types of territorial capital assets. Empirial material from Italy, Germany, Latvia, Austria, Czech Republic, Switzerland and The Netherlands covers collective farmers initiatives in fields as high quality food production, provision of new rural goods and services and region branding. A summary of recommendations, reports and other project material can be downloaded from www.cofami.org.

Fordhall Community Land Initiative – Shropshire (UK)

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By Sophie Hopkins – Fordhall Community Land Initiative in the rural county of Shropshire, England, is a pioneering venture in land acquisition and rural development (an example of Community Land Trust). 

Community Supported Agriculture
The project is an Industrial and Provident Society (‘run by the community, for the community’)  which was established to save 140 acres of land that had been organically farmed since WWII. Fordhall Farm (the family business) is today famous  for its meats, but was also the first place to produce yoghurt in UK. It uses the traditional method of foggage  farming, leaving grass-fed cattle outdoors all year. The family had been farming the land for generations but only as tenants, so when faced with eviction and development threats in 2004 the brother and  sister team (aged 19 and 21 respectively), and many others, decided to fight to secure the land. Working with local to global supporters and with the concept of Community Supported Agriculture, they devised a method to involve people in the food production chain, whilst still maintaining ownership of the farming practices. Continue reading →

The island of Vinön

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Part of the study the ENDLT network did (see blog 26 -1) was to visit a project on outdoor education on the island of Vinön.

The island is the largest island in lake Hjalmaren, approximately 200 km from Stockholm. The island has 100 permanent inhabitants and population decreased over the past twenty years. Many commute to mainland jobs, others have small-scale enterprises, often a combination of fishing, farming, gardening and tourism. The European LEADER funding for rural development has been used to develop a framework for the development of Vinön. Continue reading →

New Project – Dynamics and Robustness of Multifunctional Agriculture

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On the first of February the Rural Sociology Group, in collaboration with the Education and Competence Studies Group, will start with a large research programme entitled ‘Dynamics and Robustness of Multifunctional Agriculture’. This project is financed by the Dutch Ministry of Agriculture, Nature and Food Quality and supported by the Task Force Multifunctional Agriculture. The programme aims to deepen our understanding of the critical factors that exert an influence on the dynamics of multifunctional agriculture. Factors that could play a role are for instance the Continue reading →